Dora Taylor, parent activist in Seattle, warns of the dangers of coronavirus capitalism. She notes that some elected boards have granted unusual powers to their superintendents to make contracts. Seattle’s superintendent, she says, has signed some doozies.
It is especially sad to see Seattle in this trouble, as the parents and educators there have been unusually vigilant in protecting their public schools, especially after a Broadie made some terrible decisions.
One inexplicable decision was to hire a “strategy firm” to improve her image at the same time that teachers were being laid off.
Juneau also hired a private strategy firm Strategies 360, while teachers were losing their jobs due to budgetary restraints. Seattle Public Schools has a communications department well established within the district. Why was an additional private firm needed? A former Seattle superintendent, Dr. Goodloe-Johnson, hired the same firm to assist with her public image, but to no avail.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Hiring PR firms to spin bad news into butterflies and rainbows is nothing new. Oakland did the same thing a couple of years ago to sugar-coat the school closure/consolidation message and how great that was all supposed to be. For a mere $250,000.
over the long years of suddenly decided test-score-based reform in our city, there was so much ‘sugar-coating’ I always wondered how much, in the end, it actually cost
Thank you for this article on Denise Juneau. She is from Montana, where she was head of our Office of Public Instruction. I have mixed feelings about her. Although she is a liberal, she has some of that “I know better than you, so I really don’t need to listen” element. I’ll take a look at those stories that Dora linked to.
I was in Seattle when she was chosen and the expectation was that she would be an anti-Broadie
I’m concerned about the health concerns around the radiation levels of 5G. School were already struggling with the impact of too much tech in schools. The incidence of depression and anxiety seemed most closely related to the increased tech connectivity. Of course much of it is the social/emotional impact of social media, but the physical concerns of kids not knowing (perhaps energetically) the difference between the impasse of their own thoughts and waves (in the air) seemed to be at play. As a middle school principal we have moved over to online instruction both synchronous and asynchronous. In terms of my own health, I feel physically altered by the number of zoom meetings each day. One meeting is usually okay but after a few it is not healthy anymore.